Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Princeton University President
Shirley Tilghman, the first woman to lead the Ivy League
university, said she will retire next year.

Tilghman, 66 and a molecular biologist, was a faculty
member for 15 years before being named to run the university in
2001. She will step down at the end of the current academic year
in June 2013, the Princeton, New Jersey-based school said today
in a statement on its website.

Tilghman has been an advocate for women in the sciences and
has appointed women to prominent roles at Princeton, including
two who went on to lead other schools in the Ivy League, made up
of eight private colleges in the U.S. Northeast. In a telephone
interview today, she said she built on a record her predecessor
Harold Shapiro had established -- identifying women leaders and
giving them an opportunity to try out their leadership skills.

“The secret of appointing women is to be able to close
your eyes, and when you think of the word leader, to imagine a
woman as often as you would a man,” Tilghman said.

The Ivy League is undergoing a changing of the guard, with
two other schools -- Yale and Dartmouth -- looking for
presidents, while Brown University has a newly installed leader.
Richard C. Levin said on Aug. 30 he will retire from Yale
University after leading the New Haven, Connecticut-based school
for 20 years. Dartmouth College is also searching for a new
leader after Jim Yong Kim left the Hanover, New Hampshire-based
school on July 1 to run the World Bank.

Tilghman Proteges

Economist Christina Hull Paxson became president of Brown
University in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 1, 2012. She
replaced Ruth Simmons, who led the school for more than a
decade. Paxson left the deanship of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs.

Tilghman’s former provost, Amy Gutmann, is president of the
University of Pennsylvania.

Kathryn Hall, chairman of the Board of Trustees, will lead
the search for Tilghman’s successor, according to the statement.
The search committee will include nine members of the board,
four faculty members, two undergraduates, a graduate student and
a staff member.

“We will provide further information soon about the
process and the composition of the search committee,” Hall
said.

After taking a year’s leave, Tilghman said she plans to
return to the Princeton faculty and “to my other passion” --
teaching.

Princeton Endowment

Tilghman informed the university’s board of trustees of her
decision this weekend at the board’s regular September meeting,
according to the statement.

Princeton’s endowment was valued at $17.1 billion in June
2011. It is the fourth largest in higher education, behind
Harvard University, Yale and the University of Texas system,
according to an annual survey of endowments by the National
Association of College and University Business Officers and
Commonfund Institute.

The endowment probably earned zero to 5 percent on its
investments in the past fiscal year, Tilghman said Sept. 12 in
an interview at Bloomberg LP’s headquarters in New York. The
school is expected to report its performance by next month. The
endowment returned 22 percent in fiscal 2011 and 15 percent in
the prior period.

Under Tilghman, Princeton completed a five-year
fundraising campaign on June 20, raising a record $1.88 billion.

Career Scientist

Tilghman, a native of Toronto, received an undergraduate
degree in chemistry from Queen’s University in Kingston,
Ontario, in 1968. After two years of teaching secondary school
in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry
from Temple University in Philadelphia.

During postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of
Health, she made a number of discoveries while participating in
cloning the first mammalian gene. She also continued to make
breakthroughs as an independent investigator at the Institute
for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and an adjunct associate
professor of human genetics and biochemistry and biophysics at
the University of Pennsylvania.

There is a “natural rhythm to university presidencies,”
Tilghman said in a letter to the college community. “It is time
for Princeton to turn to its 20th president to chart the path
for the next decade and beyond.”

Tilghman is a director of Google Inc. Eric Schmidt, a
Princeton alumnus and former trustee, is chairman of the
Mountain View, California-based company.